18 year old girl spends $10k on premium texts in one month

Have a read of this one. It’s a difficult issue…

Link: Price for ‘premium’ text messages? $10,000 – The Red Tape Chronicles – MSNBC.com

Sean Clark pays extra each month for his cell phone service so his daughter Amanda can enjoy unlimited, no-charge text messaging. So the Bothell, Wash. man was stunned when his Sprint bill for September showed with nearly $10,000 in text message charges.

Now it’s worth noting that Sean Clark’s daughter — the girl in question — is described as a ‘developmentally disabled 18-year-old’.

A British company, Switch Fire, is mentioned in the article and account for about 13% of the chap’s daughter’s bill:

He also contacted the third-party text providers. One, Switchfire Ltd., a British firm, had charged for 642 messages sent from Aug. 14 to Sept. 5. At $1.99 a message, Clark’s total Switchfire bill was nearly $1,300.

The company refused to offer a refund, saying Amanda had knowingly authorized the charges. Clark provided MSNBC.com with e-mails he said were sent to him by Switchfire customer support manager named Dace Viesture.

“Having checked the history of your daughter’s number, it shows that she signed up for the service on 15 August by texting us ‘guys.’ In response to the request we then sent her the following text message:

‘Almost there! Please text the letter: ‘Y’ to: ‘74447’ to start. 14 textconnectusa.com Help?1-866-662-7132. Send STOP to end.100c per msg rcvd std msg fees,’ which she answered to with ‘yes’. This proves that she had read the previously sent text and confirmed she agreed with the information we sent to her,” the Switchfire e-mail said. “As to the age of your daughter – she has said in chat on various occasions that she is 18 years old, besides, the services she was using were not adult ones. As the service has been initiated and used, we are sorry to inform that you are not entitled to a refund.”

So, as far as Switch Fire are concerned, I don’t think there’s much more that they could have done. Since Sean’s daughter has replied ‘y’ to confirm that she’s opting in and that she’s acknowledged the service costs, she — on behalf of Sean (the bill payer) has explicitly indicated acceptance.

What do you think of this situation?

It’s a bit stupid for Sprint to simply just send a $10k bill without warning the bill payer when he got to, say, $1,000. Although do you recall when I ran up a £1,200 (or similar) data bill whilst abroad with Vodafone? No one phoned me from Vodafone. They just let me spend it…